Tag Archives: AIIM

Most often used for medium and large corporations, SharePoint’s features are widely popular among businesses with a lot of employees with needs to collaborate and archive documents. However, with new and user-friendly features, SharePoint 2013 is really perfect for any large corporation or small-to-medium-size business—giving everyone something they need.

In this study conducted by AIIM, underwritten by Kodak Alaris, 57% of the participating organizations report that SharePoint is used by more than half of their employees on an active basis—accessing content at least twice a week. In a recent ECM report, file shares are deemed the repository of choice for those files still in progress. Through progress measurement, users reported that SharePoint is doing the job it’s supposed to and that projects are moving along as planned, while only a few reported that a project has not gained success.

More than half of organizations reported only one version is currently in use, however, 60% of the largest organizations reported to support two or more live versions of SharePoint.

Though each version brought improvements to the platform, active users would like to suggest that Microsoft create an easier upgrade process for new feature improvements.

For SharePoint 2013, an improved search and metadata-based navigation system seems to be the most popular, which stands up to many other e-commerce based web sites currently in popular use. Closer integration between many of Microsoft’s programs such as Lync, Outlook, and Exchange proves to be a point of great loyalty for consumers. Always considered by Microsoft as a platform rather than an application, SharePoint encourages its users to explore the capabilities the program has to offer.

In a joint study with AIIM’s Market Intelligence division, underwritten by Kodak Alaris; progress, upgrades, and utilization of SharePoint 2013 is discussed in “Clouding the Issues.” This blog highlights key findings from that study and provides a free version of the report.

In the last ten years, SharePoint has had four major versions—SharePoint 2013 being the most recent one. While all four versions are utilized by various organizations, the most current version of SharePoint has had a great deal of impact on document management and enterprise content management (ECM).

SharePoint expands its market with greater opportunities for adoption across the enterprise, leading to greater usage than other systems. SharePoint 2013 offers features that speak to the content management debate and allow users to fulfill needs in areas such as customization and third-party, add-on products.

SharePoint 2013 offers alignment of the “365” family of cloud contributions from Microsoft, integration with other enterprise systems and third-party add-ons with the cloud feature.

The study available looks at adoption rates and roll-out status for SharePoint as an enterprise content management system, issues of user adoption, and the overall success of the product. Adoption and difficulties are measured, along with examination of the new 2013 features and third-party add-on products. Also mentioned is spending plans for licenses, services, and add-on products.

Key findings support that:

57% of survey responding organizations use SharePoint for enterprise content management and 31% consider it to be their main or only ECM system. 28% only use SharePoint for collaboration sites/intranet

22% sought no external advice or training, and only 28% took external training—only 17% used specialist ECM solutions (most relied on general IT consultants or channel resellers)

Biggest on-going issues are adoption, extending the business scope, and governance. Achieving uniformity of classification and metadata is also a big issue

38% are supporting two or more live versions. 21% of large organizations are supporting three or more. Most respondents considered the upgrade progress more of a migration than an upgrade

45% plan to be on SharePoint 2013 by mid 2014; improved search and navigation is deemed the most useful new feature. Close integration with Outlook, Exchange, and Lync are also welcomed, along with better mobile device support, and improved retention management.

33% are struggling with their SharePoint implementation, and 28% say progress has stalled. However, 40% are moving forward

18 % use the standard product, while 30% are using somewhat of a customized version

In 49% of organizations, the current driving force is the IT Department, 14% have a multi-departmental steering committee

67% still see third-party products as important; like system monitoring, BPM, storage, management, metadata management, and records management

The most popular auxiliary products are: migration tools, unified data interfaces, and scanning and capture

In today’s modern enterprise business landscape, implementing a strong formula for success is key to optimizing the customer’s overall experience when interacting with that business. It’s crucial to have accurate, consistent, and compliant communication. Furthermore, fast and efficient communications are expected from today’s “always on” customers.

The adoption and proliferation of digital communications, customers’ expectations have grown to unprecedented levels in this area of business. Unfortunately, this means these expectations of speed and efficiency are often the same regardless of the communication medium or channel with which they reach out to a business. This can cause some headaches when trying to match digital speeds for conventional, paper-based channels and documents.

Most organizations receive inbound communications via at least four channels (plus telephone) with multiple content types per channel. These channels typically differ greatly when it comes to customer response times and process efficiencies. In a recent study by Kodak Alaris and AIIM, organizations admitted to vast improvement needs based on communication and input channel:

How would you rate the speed of response from your organization when customers use the following channels? (N=260)

Adopting sound processes and gaining efficiencies through the implementation of modern technology can help your business stay at the cutting edge and meet these high customer expectations. Once all communications channels are integrated, and transactional, customer and content systems are interconnected, efficiency techniques and process improvements can be applied to enhance productivity, but more importantly to improve the overall customer experience.

Use intelligent information to improve the customer experience (read AIIM’s whitepaper on this topic: http://bit.ly/1mUL4jZ).

Improving the overall customer experience for your business is crucial to success—both in the short term and for the long haul. We’ve seen that placing high value and attention on customer experience is critical to the business success and competitive status of most organizations.

It’s no secret that today’s customers are using a multitude of communication channels, regardless of industry or even demographic. It’s imperative that organizations accommodate for the multitude of channels and content types that the modern customer decides to use for communications.

In order to ensure your organization is optimizing the customer experience, you must ask yourself the right questions. Below are a few questions (along with brief reasoning for those questions) that you should be asking yourself when thinking about process improvements and efficiencies for your customer experience:

Do you allow for multichannel communication from your customers? Modern customers use many different channels to reach businesses today. Making your organization easily accessible on multiple channels will greatly improve today’s customer experience.

Do you have a coordinated approach to handling multiple communication channels? A multitude of channels can result in a flood of data. Having an effective workflow in place to manage this flood is key.

Do you monitor response times and procedures on all channels? Analytics are key to process optimizations. Optimizing customer response time is made possible by knowing where efficiencies and improvements can be gained.

Does all of your customer-facing staff have access to all customer profile data? Customers get easily frustrated when they feel the staff member with whom they are communicating isn’t up to speed on all previous correspondence or order history.

Have you implemented modern data-extraction technology? New technology could be saving you input management costs and reducing both time and errors. Try out the latest solutions using your own documents and forms.

Asking yourself these questions, among others, will allow you to ensure your overall business experience is optimal for your most prized asset—the customer.

Saying that organizations are under pressure to streamline their business processes to make them more economical, faster, and more automated is a pretty universal statement. Sounds familiar to you, right? However, how does this pressure align with today and tomorrow’s exploding volume and variety of communication channels—Tweets, e-mails, and more? Also, how are organizations handling customers’ growing expectations to receive an instant response regardless of the communication channel that they choose?

If these are challenges that you face, and you’re at AIIM Conference 2014 (#AIIM14), we invite you to discuss and learn how to conquer both optimized business processes and customer experiences during Kodak Alaris’ “Group Therapy” round table.

Our learning objectives and key takeaways for the session include the following

Intersections of business processes and customer communication workflows you need to monitor

If you aren’t able to attend the round table while you’re at AIIM or because you did not attend the conference, stay tuned for a summary of the discussion shortly after the conference. We will post it on this blog.

Do you have any questions about this topic or the session? Hope to see you there.